05 May 2016

The rise of Wholesale Sweets and American Candy in Britain

American candy is very much it's own industry of late, with a record number of us hitting the aisles of foreign food sections at the supermarket to get our fix, and logging onto online wholesale sweets retailers in order to obtain American-manufactured sweets and candies by the bucket load. While of course we feel brand loyalty to our own brands (Cadburys and Swizzels-Matlow are firm memories of most of our childhoods and no amount of interestingly flavoured jellybean or peanut-butter cup can take that away!) statistics show that British consumers are choosing American products more and more as of late.
An interesting thing about American chocolate is the masses of peanut butter that’s used in comparison to our own methods of including milk, vegetable oil and cocoa to chocolate.  (Did you know that British chocolate bars cannot be imported into America, as they believe that vegetable oil has no place in a chocolate bar?) To those from the UK, peanut butter is a strange option to put next to chocolate. It’s not like we’re unadventurous. We add chili, mint, orange, caramel, and a multitude of other things to our chocolate, but peanut butter? Never. It’s just not done.

It’s not that novelty isn’t something done in the UK, it’s more a case of we, as a nation, appear very set in our ways of “this works, and that doesn’t.” the fact that boundaries are pushed within American candies would indicate a large reason of why American products are so very popular in the UK, with British confectioners choosing to import products from the US.  
While the taste is jarring, (even described as somewhat disconcerting by some) the first time, there’s no doubt about the fact that it’s certainly an acquired one. It’s like anything else -- Expose yourself to new things enough, and you’ll find whether it works or doesn’t. Peanut butter and chocolate are one of the weirder food combinations that work, as the British public have found. Manufacturers such as Hersheys are absolutely iconic stateside – their products recognized as America personified to some of us.
American ingenuity is something they’ve always broadcasted, bigger, better, weirder and even more wonderful. Candy is no exception to that rule -- with lots of products popular simply because they’re like the America in itself, loud, proud, and different.